3
I would have blinked reproachfully at the world through pebble glasses, my jacket with its leather elbow-patches and scarred with ash that fell from the cigarette scorching my lips as I sifted through papers in the front room. My jumper would be splashed with food, my fly-buttons sometimes negligently left unfastened. I would have been tolerated as a harmless eccentric, as I sat in the parlour, the glass cupboard of china and crockery dim with dust, the brown and green carpet worn threadbare by the boots of fellow-workers; men and women who had come to see me with their tale of unfair dismissal, visits to the sanatorium to see their boy destined to die of TB, the fear of the workhouse, the woman jailed because she could not afford to pay the fine for the theft of a lipstick from Woolworth’s...
I would also have had another, secret life, perhaps; standing at the white ceramic stalls, with their persistent drip of water, of the public lavatory in Cow Meadow after the pubs closed, looking for fleeting sexual contact; at the same time, terrified of police agents provocateurs, of blackmail, of meeting someone from the factory – although that would at least have ensured mutual silence on what were then regarded as depraved tastes. I might have been arrested for indecency: under the watch of the police for one kind of anti-social activity, I might have been caught for a quite different offence against society...
Or perhaps not: I might well have been able to drown my deeper needs in the suffering of others, of which there would be no dearth – short-time working, the activities of the shit-house cop, who timed people’s visits to relieve themselves, and anything over three minutes reported to the supervisory staff; the demands of sickness on an income, more than eighty per cent of which went on food, fuel and rent; the flit to avoid arrears, moving with a handcart in the middle of the night. Then there would have been trade union meetings, the Labour Party, and lectures from the University extra-mural department; with never enough hours in the day to answer all the calls upon my time. As well as this, there was work – the snatched cup of tea and toast, kicking up yellow sparks on the pavement from the ‘blakeys’ or studs in the heel of the boots, then clocking in for nine hours in the bare clicking room, the only ornament a square clock with spindly Roman numerals.
Part II of ‘Work I Never Did’, in which Jeremy Seabrook considers his observation of – and possible participation in – the undoing of Britain’s working class, will be published tomorrow.